On Monday, 21 November 1748, notices began to appear in the London General Advertiser for the first volume of Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Published within the same twelve-month period as Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), and the concluding volumes of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-1748), this first-person narrative of a young prostitute named Fanny Hill is now generally acknowledged to be "the first original English prose pornography, and the first to break away from the dialogue form into the style of the novel." Long considered by specialists in the study of pornographic literature to be "the best erotic novel in the English language" and "one of western literature's great books," Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has recently come to be treated as a characteristic and significant example of the mid-eighteenth-century British novel. Banned soon after its initial...